Talk:Bacillus Anthracis: Anthrax Lethal Toxin

Overall Comments:
Good choice of topic! As for suggestions, your wiki page is pretty short at the moment, so I’ve tried to mention some additional topics you could go into, and things that you can explain in more detail. Other than that suggestion, the thing I would recommend the most would be to go back and read through the entire thing a few more times looking for awkward sentences.

Comments by Section:
Introduction -You first paper you reference is by “Grunow”, but that paper doesn’t appear in your references so far as I can tell.

Life Cycle
-The first sentence of this section is extremely choppy- lots of commas. Maybe try “When B. anthracis leaves the dying host organism in its vegetative form and enters the environment, sporulation occurs.
-Typo – change “infections particles” to “infectious particles”
-Since sporulation is so important to the organism’s life cycle, it might be worth explaining the process in a greater level of detail, for example by finding a step-by-step diagram and explaining what happens on a cellular level.

Pathogenesis
-Maybe consider discussing the “lipid raft” seen in the figure? It sounds interesting.
-What is the normal cellular function of anthrax toxin receptor? Is it known?
-The title of your wiki page seems to imply that you want to focus on anthrax toxin, so it might be appropriate to expand this section by discussing the molecular aspects of anthrax toxin more closely. You could add content discussing the structure of the toxin and its various subunits, how they interact with each other on a molecular/structural level to form the complexes, and then how those complexes in turn interact with the targets. You could find figures of the crystal structures to help with this discussion.

Anthrax Toxin Neutralization with Antibody
-What is “XTT”?
-You don’t need to reference Figure 1 here. Did you mean to reference figure 3?
-Consider including a more thorough explanation of the results from figure 3. For example, explain in greater detail why both antibodies seem to work against LF + PA83 in part A, but only cAb29 seems to work in part B. What do you conclude based on that result?

Target Cells in Humans in Inhalation Anthrax
-You reference Figure 2 when you mean to reference figure 4.
-What is a surfactant, and why might it help the bacteria to disseminate more easily?

(Michael Harden)

Nice job giving practical implication of understanding anthrax better in the introduction. All sections seem thorough enough. Perhaps put some links in for sources to your images and include years in your in-text citations? --- Faiza